INTERNATIONAL: Embracing the Forbidden to Drive a Point Home

Poor Michael Sanguinetti - he had no idea he was lighting the slow-burning fuse which set off a squib that's been heard around the world. Sanguinetti is a police constable in Toronto, who, while speaking to some law students at York University in January, demonstrated a common attitude about rape: "I've been told I'm not supposed to say this ... however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised." It took a while, but that remark triggered a reaction far beyond the country's borders.

After complaints about the officer's unfortunate remark his bosses reprimanded him and issued an apology. Heather Jarvis and her friend Sonya Barnett were so incensed that they got on to Facebook and other social media and organised a protest march they called SlutWalk Toronto. They scheduled April 3 to march the few blocks from the Ontario Legislature to the headquarters of the Toronto Police Service. They figured that perhaps a couple of hundred people would show up, but to their surprise more than 3000 turned out.

That Sunday afternoon the marchers were dressed in everything from T-shirts and blue jeans to the fancy outfits you see in fashion publications. They carried placards bearing slogans like "Met a slut today? Don't assault her", "Enjoying sex doesn't involve violence", and "I'm a slut - don't assault me!". As Jarvis explains their reaction: "We had just had enough ... it isn't about just one idea or one police officer who practises victim blaming, it's about changing the system and doing something constructive with anger and frustration." What these protesters want to change is the public attitude towards rape and assault which scrutinises the behaviour of the victim more than that of the perpetrator of the crime.

That protest attracted attention far and wide. Facebook groups were formed in several cities across the US. There have been SlutWalks in Dallas, Texas; Hartford, Connecticut; Boston, Massachusetts and Rochester, New York, to name a few places. Other groups have sprung up across Europe, Asia and as far away as Australia.

There is nothing new in the attitude of blaming the victim for the crime, especially when it's rape. That's why backward cultures continue to uphold a repressive dress convention on women. Perhaps the worst example is Afghanistan, where women in many places are obliged to venture in public only after putting on the dreadful burka - a blue tent made of heavy material that covers the entire body and amounts to a personal, ambulatory prison. The only opening is a mesh in front of the eyes. On a trip to Oman several years ago I marvelled at the sight of some Bedouin women in a small desert town dressed in flowing black robes with head wraps and Lone ranger-type masks. The temperature hovered around 35-38°C and my khaki shirt was already damp with sweat at eleven in the morning.

But so-called civilised cultures also share this attribution of sexual assault to the way a woman is dressed or expresses her sexuality - in courts of law as well as in the court of public opinion. "She was asking for it" is the comment we - sadly - hear much too often, as is the once-commonly accepted description of rape: "Assault with a friendly weapon". Old attitudes die hard, as that hapless constable has demonstrated, but many police forces do conduct sensitivity training on how to handle rape cases and both they and the courts are much more aggressive in dealing with them.

In 1987 a woman in Toronto who called herself Jane Doe launched a successful lawsuit against the police because she claimed they used her as bait to catch a serial rapist. She lived in a multi-storey building downtown and the previous year an attacker had entered her apartment from the balcony. The "balcony rapist", as he became known, had assaulted several other women before the police caught him and a court sent him to prison for 20 years. After her assault, women wanted to put up posters warning neighbours about the rapist, but the police wouldn't let them. They had a stakeout plan and felt the poster campaign would interfere with it. The judge who heard the case ruled that Doe and other women had been used without their knowledge or consent to attract a predator.

Some feminists criticise the protesters' co-opting of the word "slut" in their drive to lance the boil and drain the poison. But claiming ownership of a hitherto taboo description is an understandable human reaction and it's why black people have taken over the word "nigger" with a positive spin and homosexuals have favourably and enthusiastically co-opted "queer" in reaction to its highly pejorative meaning.

The whole subject is, naturally, an emotionally charged one, and even sophisticated women who make their living dealing with controversial and unpleasant subjects are often uncomfortable discussing rape publicly when they are the targets. Two women reporters who were raped while on assignments abroad recently spoke about their experiences, painful as it was for them to recall.

You have probably heard about Lara Logan, chief foreign correspondent for the CBS television network in the US. While covering the remarkable events in Egypt last February, a group of men grabbed her in Cairo's Tahrir Square and some of them raped her before she was eventually released. Another reporter, Mellissa Fung of Canada's CBC network, was on assignment in Afghanistan in 2008 when some bandits seized her and held her for 28 days.

She has just released a book about her ordeal, which included a vicious sexual assault at knife-point by one of her captors. During the debriefing in Kabul after her release, Fung was asked if she had been sexually abused. She said she wasn't. "You don't want to be seen as susceptible to something that one of my male colleagues wouldn't be." But as she wrote and re-wrote the book, she concluded that it just didn't feel right to leave it out, and, as a Western woman, she had a responsibility to talk about it.

Fung told the Globe and Mail newspaper: "It's not just about me ... it happens every day to so many women in Afghanistan." The cultural difference is stark: "They don't think of rape or sexual assault as a crime there, and a woman who speaks out about it is put in jail for committing adultery. So who am I to hide that when I can talk freely about it here?"

At the root of the problem is the power imbalance between the sexes - even in the most highly developed societies there remains a vestige of the belief that women are somehow the property of men. Couple that with the idea that rape is a sexual act. It resembles sexual union only because it employs the same equipment. Rape is an ugly and reprehensible act - an act of rage, of raw power, of physical dominance over someone else, fuelled by large doses of hatred and malevolence. The penis is the actual weapon, but the real culprit is located in the bony case at the other end of the spinal column.

That's the only place where you can effectively fight this evil.